Puppy users in the USA who have an interest in maps may want to take Place-n-Time for a spin.

This application displays maps using data from the U. S. Geological Survey (USGS).

The data available doesn't provide for a general-purpose atlas with street names and such, like, for instance, Open Street Map data, but will be of interest for those who would like to examine an area as digitized by the Geological Survey in these early digital line graphs "DLGs".

The package includes sample files for learning how to use the application, and you may then download files covering your area of interest directly from the USGS. Also included is an illustrated user guide, which is recommended reading (and also available online: Place-n-Time User Guide).

Previous versions of Place-n-Time were only available in a .tar.gz package which included an installation script. It is still available in that form, but I thought I would add an .sfs package so that it could be easily loaded only when needed, and not take up space in a Puppy save file.

Place-n-Time will open and display a sample large scale map: Hanover, New Hampshire, U.S.A.

When you move your pointer into the Work Window, you will note that the Coordinate Box at the lower left will display two forms of coordinates: Northings & Eastings and Latitude & Longitude.

As you move your pointer over the map surface you will also note that the state, county, and town are shown in the Location Box at the lower right.

Pointing at objects will highlight them. If you point at a line, the length of the line will be displayed in the Status Box at the bottom. (Lengths won't be displayed for maps with a non-linear coordinate system.)

To zoom in, point to a northern corner of your area of interest, then hold the left pointer button as you move the pointer across and down to the opposite corner before releasing the button. To zoom out, do the same thing, but start from a southern corner.

To move the map surface, grab it with the middle pointer button.

To load an intermediate scale map for the same area, place the pointer anywhere on the surface of the current map and press or click the right button, then choose "Load Intermediate Scale" from the popup menu.

You can, of course, load small, intermediate, or large scale maps by choosing the appropriate item from the right-button menu.

Once you download a collection of maps, you may also use this method to load maps for areas surrounding the original map surface.

Don't be confused by the Open entry in the File menu. That is for loading .shp and .gchar files created by another application, not the USGS files. The USGS files are always loaded with the right-button menu.

In step 1 you may enter an address/placename or set of coordinates, or you may simply zoom in and click on the map displayed. (If you choose to enter an address/placename, be sure to then click on Show and select an entry from the list that appears.) Then click Data Sets to go to step 2.

In step 2 you should click on Digital Line Graphs, then click on the check box for DLG 1:100k if you want intermediate scale or click on the check box for DLG Large Scale if that is what you want. Then click Additional Criteria to go to step 3.

In step 3 you should choose one or more items from the Overlay ID or Product Group list. (Which list appears depends upon your selection in step 2.) (To select more than one item, hold your Ctrl key while clicking.) Place-N-Time currently supports the following items:

Overlay ID
Boundaries
Hydrography
Transportation

Product Group
7.5-MIN DLG Bound
7.5-MIN DLG Hydro
7.5-MIN DLG Trans

Then click Results to go to step 4.

In step 4 you will see a list of files that matched your criteria. There are buttons below each file in the list which let you see the map footprint, examine its metadata, or download it. (It does ask you to log in to download.)

(Note that some maps have been split into pieces, but the footprint displayed is for the entire map. In such cases you will need to download multiple files to cover the entire footprint.)

For additional information on how to get DLG map data and GNIS placename data, look here: DLG and here: GNIS.

Yes, Place-n-Time is not very demanding when it comes to dependencies. I'm a believer in using the minimum libraries necessary to do the job, rather than require the installation of a lot of new libraries. Official Puppies from 4.3.1 and newer should already have the necessary dependencies. I think this build of Place-n-Time will run with any glibc version 2.3 or higher. (The other package (the .tar.gz) has a build that will actually run with glibc 2.1.1 and gtk 1.2 with a 2.0.36 kernel. We're talking backward compatibility to 1999!)

Happy testing! I'll look forward to hearing how it works (or doesn't) for you.

which made it necessary to remove the links from /usr/local/share/* into my /opt/placeandtime folder manually , because --remove-destination did not work as expected .

No dice .

Xorg driver is i810 btw .
Since I thought it would be kind of similar to googeearth, which needs Mesa/GL driver activated by Xorg , I ldd 'ed it , but no reference to mesa or any libGLUT* or whatsoever .

Thanks for the feedback. I'm sorry to hear that Place-n-Time has been uncooperative for you.

Karl Godt wrote:

The terminal showed a never ending loop of

Quote:

Error allocating memory for <nad_file_list>.

I've been looking into this. I've even tried running in Puppy 4.3.1. While I have not been able to reproduce the same error message, I think that probably the lookup_nad file got corrupted. It lives in the /usr/local/share/placentime/essential/ directory.

If I corrupt my copy I see that the application does go into a loop and starts eating memory, although I never get the error message that you did.

I probably should post the md5sum for the the package. Here it is:

6ea653f5b0cf2da53cfce4225752657c placentime_view-0.03-1.sfs

Also, here is the md5sum for the lookup_nad file:

5094d948800a51a6712ae623a921617f lookup_nad

While I am hoping that replacing your copy of the file will solve that problem for you, you have discovered something that I should fix, since a corrupt data file should cause the application to exit gracefully, and certainly not cause it to start gobbling memory.

While I had anticipated that most people would simply install the package and run it as is, it should be possible to place the files elsewhere in your directory tree if you so desire.

To install Place-n-Time into your /opt/ directory, you will need to edit the /etc/placentimerc.first file. That is the configuration file that tells placentime were everything lives. It is currently configured for the places where things live in the .sfs file.

You can probably figure out what you have to change just by looking at the file, but for details see Editing Run Control Files in the user guide.

The /etc/placentimerc.first is one file that cannot be relocated. You can also have a $HOME/.placentime/placentimerc file which has the same format, and will override settings in the /etc/placentimerc.first file. In fact, if you don't want to add anything to your /etc/ directory, you can simply:

It might be caused by recompiled libraries on my side too . Until now I could not notice any problems with other programs though .

What I should probably mention :
Am throttled down to analog speed until the day after tomorrow and have a wget running in another case since more than 24 hours in another terminal .
I hope that lack of a current available reasonable speed or lack of any internet connection nor firewall issues do not choke some features of the program .

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